LawsonGuru Blog
Thought-Provoking Commentary for the Lawson Software Community
Is there a “LawsonAppliance” in your Future?
Is Lawson Enterprise-Ready?
Are You Aligned?
We always hear a lot about IT alignment. That is, how aligned your IT goals are with goals of your business? Usually, these are addressed in a macro view, but rarely in micro. But what about within the IT organization itself? Are its goals aligned internally within IT?
Should We Keep Lawson?
It’s an interesting dilemma. A Lawson client asked me why they should continue to use Lawson for their HR software. While they use for Lawson for Financials, they really don’t utilize much of the HR suite:
Apple’s Stupefying Search Box
More Bandwidth ≠ Greater Productivity
Business Week published an article, “Ten Penny-Pinching Ideas for 2008” (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071120_184990.htm) which got my attention. No, it wasn’t the sarcastic reference to “the best ways to soak your overpriced tech consultants for free advice” in the opening teaser. Read more of this post
Whatever Happened to “Upgrade While Active”??
During the 7.2 -> 8.0 Applications upgrade cycle, Lawson introduced “Upgrade While Active” (at CUE 2003 I think…). This changed the upgrade process to reduce the downtime required to move the data from between application product lines as part of the upgrade.
The 8.0 -> 9.0 Applications were rewritten to use the Java-based sqldbcopy, and table data is copied between product lines/databases directly on the database server rather than the previously-used dump/load method. This, of course, speeds things up dramatically. Read more of this post
Now (NOT) Serving Number …
Nothing says “we don’t care” better than lousy customer service. This was the “greeting” I received this morning on Lawson’s Support site when trying to open a case:
Maybe I’m just a little unreasonable, but this was on a Monday morning at 8:25am EDT. Read more of this post
Not a Win For LWSN
SAP announced today that Wal-Mart has selected SAP for Financials: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071018/sap_contract.html
I honestly don’t think Lawson competes on the same level as SAP on Financials products. But the SAP win at Wal-Mart is interesting, given Wal-Mart’s previous selection of Lawson for HR/Payroll, and Lawson’s assertions about how “Wal-Mart Loves Lawson” Read more of this post
How Slow Is Your Upgrade?
It’s a complaint I hear often, although not as often as I used to hear it. The upgrade programs/process was re-worked to take advantage of sqldbcopy, which solves some of the speed issues for copy jobs (i.e. tables which don’t require conversion). For those, the copying is done directly on the database server. However, some of the pre-jobs, loads, and post-jobs continue to be a bottleneck. Read more of this post
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